On Zero Emissions Day, Commit to Cutting Methane Emissions

Wednesday is Zero Emissions Day--a call to action focused on protecting our world from greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging people and organizations to not burn oil or gas. At MacArthur Foundation we are focused on reducing the harmful effects of methane emissions.

Methane comes primarily from oil and gas infrastructure, landfills, and agricultural sources such as livestock. Methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but it is a much more damaging greenhouse gas. Methane generates more than 80 times the warming over a 20-year period, according to MacArthur’s grantee Environmental Defense Fund . In fact, evidence suggests reducing methane gas is the fastest way to address climate change in the short term.

At the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow last year I was proud to support the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment by the United States, European Union, and more than 110 countries to reduce methane emissions 30 percent below 2020 levels by the end of the decade. MacArthur contributed $10 million to the Global Methane Hub, the largest international philanthropic initiative to-date to coordinate an approach to reduce methane emissions 50 percent by 2050. More than 20 major philanthropic institutions have committed more than $300 million to the effort so far.

The Global Methane Hub will provide funding and technical guidance to countries to track, regulate, and ultimately curtail emissions of this powerful greenhouse gas that drives at least 25 percent of today’s warming. It just made an investment of $5 million to an African Development Bank program to reduce methane emissions.

MacArthur has long contributed to methane reduction by supporting the work of groups like Environmental Defense Fund, Clean Air Task Force, Earthworks, and others. These organizations work to make this invisible threat visible, and they advocate for regulation and enforcement at national and international levels.

We are also deeply motivated by the unequal impact of methane, on top of the already inequitable harms of climate change.

We already know that there are dramatic gaps in how much communities are prepared to respond to and recover from the climate crisis. And methane emissions are more likely to impact people who are otherwise already vulnerable. Communities that are proximate to methane pollution tend to be part of already marginalized groups: people of color, people facing economic and nutritional insecurity, agricultural workers, elderly people, and people with disabilities. Reducing methane emissions is environmental justice.

In the United States, the Clean Air Task Force found that Black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live in fence-line communities, within a half-mile of?oil and methane gas wells, processing, transmission, and storage facilities.

Methane pollution poses an especially immediate danger to frontline communities where it leaks. Methane is usually accompanied by other health-damaging air pollutants and is the primary contributor to ground level ozone, which is known to cause premature birth, asthma, cancer, and exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.?

With these considerations front of mind, we must ensure the burden of reducing methane emissions is equitable.?The 30 percent target set by the pledge is global, not restricted to a single country’s borders. That also means the biggest emitters—the U.S. and the European Union—have a larger share of the responsibility and must set a high standard of ambition.

As I said in Glasgow, this demands government, the private sector, and philanthropy act ambitiously, just as the nations joining the global pledge have said they will.